The Outrun (Sony Pictures Classics, R)

Nora Fingscheidt’s The Outrun*, based on the memoir of the same name by Amy Liptrot, is not a film you just see—it’s a film you experience with your body, from the crashing waves surf on the Orkney Islands to the thumping beat of a London nightclub. You also feel the emotions of the central character Rona (Saoirse Ronan) as if they were your own, which is a tribute to both Ronan’s performance and to the Fingscheidt’s direction. 

Don’t go to this film if you’re not looking for an intense experience, in other words. If you are up for it, however, you’ll get to see one of the finest acting performances of the year, captured with great attention to atmosphere by cinematographer Yunus Roy Imer. Special bonus: much of The Outrun was shot on locations in the Orkneys, including Kirkwall, Stromness and Papa Westray, and you get to see both the beauty and the desolation of isolation life. 

When she was young, Rona couldn’t wait to get away from her parent’s farm in the Orkney Islands (off the northeast coach of Scotland), where she was saddled with a bipolar father (Stephen Dillane) and a mother (Saskia Reeves) so religious she sometimes seems to have left her humanity behind. Rona found freedom in London, all right, but also drugs and alcohol, which she abused to the point of blacking out and more than once had to ask her perfectly nice boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu) “What did I do last night?” She made a fine mess of her life, in other words, and even if you’re as cute as Saoirse Ronan there are limits to what people will put up with.

After completing a recovery program in London, Rona returns home to her parent’s farm to try to regain her sense of self and keep away from the influences that got her into trouble. After a rough beginning, she starts to come back to herself, a process that accelerates after she later gets a job observing corncrakes on the more remote island of Papa Westray, where Liptrot wrote the memoir that forms the basis for this film.  

The Outrun is often described as an addiction memoir (or recovery memoir), which may be a fair description of the book, but those labels give a misleading idea of what the film is really like. Although it does not shy away from portraying Liptrot’s alcoholism and recovery, it’s really a coming-of-age story that was slightly delayed due to substance abuse. Over the course of the film, we see a young woman coming to terms with herself and her demons, while also coming into herself and finding her place in the world. That the process took place somewhat later than is expected in the conventional chronology is beside the point: it happened, and that’s something to celebrate.

The story of The Outrun (from a screenplay by Liptrot and Fingscheidt) is told in fragments and out of order, a choice that doesn’t serve the material well. When the main subject of a film is the maturation of an individual, cutting back and forth in time is often more annoying than enlightening, and that’s certainly the case here.  The film is also over-long, with too many repetitive sequences of dissipation in London (the recovery is far more interesting than the addiction). On the plus side, since Fingscheidt isn’t trying to create a conventional biopic, jumping around in time works facilitates a mood that can accommodate some of the film’s more expressionistic segments, and those succeed reasonably well in finding visual analogues to Rona’s inner states. | Sarah Boslaugh

*In Scots, the term “outrun” refers to the enclosed arable land around a homestead. 

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